Anything could happen
Serendipity Part II
Last year, I wrote about the carpenter who was born in my house. I’ve since met his older brother, who I unknowingly bought a piece of furniture from, only to realize he had also been born in the home. When he dropped off the furniture, he took a tour of the house and told me about the night he fell off the second floor loft in his sleep and got a concussion, after which his dad added a railing. Then last week, I came across some discussion about a local farm that was fighting to keep access to the hay fields they’d farmed for forty years. When I realized it was their family’s farm, I reached out, and that’s how their sister ended up coming by for a visit last week.
This installment of Mel’s Notebook is emailed to paid subscribers every Thursday at 9AM EST. If you would also like to receive it by email, become a paid subscriber and and get a peek behind the scenes of my creative life!
I live in a fairly small town in Western Massachusetts, so it’s no surprise that I would come into contact the family who built my home. They’ve been in this valley for generations. Every time our paths cross, it feels inevitable. I walk them through the house their father built by hand with with logs milled from the trees on site and they tell me about the lives that were lived here long before mine. It’s special. Serendipitous. Magical. This time, I got to help with the organizing to save their family’s hay fields from development. It feels like a circle completing. I’m thrilled for the opportunity to give back, because this home gave me a whole new life.
When my third book for young readers was ready for blurbs, I knew who I wanted to send it to. I had a list of the authors who I admired who I thought might enjoy the story: Erin Entrada Kelly, Lisa Fipps, Adrianna Cuevas, Caroline Gertler, Dan Gemeinhart, Debbie Reed Fischer, and Gary D. Schmidt. I’m fortunate to call many of these authors friends and colleagues, but I had only met Gary D. Schmidt once.
I didn’t have a personal connection to him outside of one small literary event we had attended together. It was a single day writers conference at a high school in rural Pennsylvania. Gary and I were both on the faculty but he was slated to speak multiple times in the auditorium while I was primarily doing work in classrooms. Still, I attended his closing address for the event and what he said there changed my life.
